10 Ideas For The Interested This Week

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects is still the secret of great creative people.” — Leo Burnett

How do you find what you’re not looking for?

I discovered one of the main reasons people value this newsletter is because its eclectic nature exposes them to ideas they didn’t know they wanted.

It’s made me realize that’s much harder to do than it used to be.

While it’s never been easier to find information about things we search out, the filter bubbles of our social media feeds and onslaught of stuff competing for our attention makes it harder than ever to stumble into things we didn’t know we needed to see.

I’m glad For The Interested has become a way to solve that problem for so many of you.

“We’re moving towards a portfolio model of careers, a world in which kids growing up today will probably have five jobs at the same time. But the current model of education is preparing them for a future that doesn’t exist.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a classroom, but I’m sure we’re not teaching kids the things they need to know to succeed in the modern world.

“Most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to your life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it’s really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.”

We tend to think consuming news every day is a good thing, but we might be wrong.

“The acceleration of time is the result of our increasing tendency through life to package distinct experiences into bigger ‘chunks.’ For example, for a child, a walk in the park can involve so many new experiences — their first sighting of flowers covered in snow, perhaps, or of a scary dog — that each are remembered as distinct individual events. For the adult accompanying that child, if nothing novel happens, all the varied sensations and impressions associated with that walk may be collapsed — or ‘chunked’ — into a single memory of ‘a walk in the park.’”

It seems like time moves faster every year, but research has found there may be a reason for that — and something we can do to slow down the sensation.

It turns out people who make an effort to live in the moment and avoid grouping experiences such as their “commute,” “work,” or “family time” together in their own mind tend to experience the passage of time more slowly than those that don’t.

“We capture a tiny fraction of what happens to us. Since our memory comprises a selection of moments, there’s the possibility of an event being remembered very differently dependent on which precise moments stick in our memory.”

Most of the work companies do to create memorable brand experiences isn’t necessary — because it’s forgotten.

“Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.”

When asked what was the hardest part of communicating with employees, 37% of managers said giving them negative feedback, 20% struggled to share their own vulnerability, and another 20% disliked being the messenger for company policies.